What It Really Takes to Find 'The One' | Ep 707

This episode delves into the challenges and strategies of finding a lifelong partner, emphasizing high standards and self-improvement.

1. The choice of a life partner is more critical than most day-to-day decisions.
2. High personal standards in choosing a partner are crucial.
3. The importance of aligning with a partner who shares similar goals and values.
4. Self-improvement is key to attracting the right partner.
5. The dangers of settling for less in relationships are significant.

1: The Importance of Choosing Wisely

Alex discusses how critical the decision of choosing a partner is compared to other life decisions. Alex Hormozi: "Most people spend more time deciding what car to buy than who they will marry, which is dumb."

2: High Standards and Self-Improvement

This chapter emphasizes maintaining high standards for oneself and potential partners. Alex Hormozi: "I believe in having exceptionally high standards, only second to the standards you hold yourself to."

3: The Role of Self-Growth in Relationships

Hormozi shares how personal growth and having a partner who can grow with you are essential for a lasting relationship. Alex Hormozi: "If they haven't are capable of change, then you're guaranteed that you will grow apart."

1. Reflect deeply on your values and ensure they align with your partner’s.
2. Do not compromise on your standards; hold out for a partner who meets them.
3. Invest time in personal growth and self-improvement.
4. Be open to meeting new people but be selective in advancing relationships.
5. Prioritize finding someone who shares your life goals and ambitions.

”The person you spend the rest of your life with will have the largest impact on who you become.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) explores the profound influence of choosing the right life partner on individual happiness, personal growth, and achievements. He emphasizes the correlation between well-being and strong relationships, the importance of shared values and growth, and the role of self-improvement in attracting a compatible partner, offering valuable insights for those seeking contentment through meaningful relationships and self-betterment.

Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.

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Alex Hormozi
It would be harder for me to find someone now than to find someone when I did that, finding somebody who basically would have gone through the same stimuli that I went through over the last decade with Layla. To get to where we're at now, it'd be almost impossible to put someone else through the same gauntlet so they could be shaped the same way.

Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com dot. I always wished Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented journey, so I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy.

The person you spend the rest of your life with will have the largest impact on who you become, what you achieve, and how happy you are. But most people spend more time deciding what car they want to buy or what neighborhood they're going to live in than the person they're going to marry. And that's dumb. When I was in college, there was a graph they put on the board in my economics class that said that there's a 0.71 correlation between your subjective well being and the strength of your relationship with your significant other. And so I was like, oh, so everybody cool wants to be happy, which is, we'll just put a pin in that for a second.

But if that is their stated desire, you have a 71 correlation between the strength of your relationship with your significant other and if you pair that with amount of time spent with friends, family, kids, alone and spouse. Over time, alone and spouse go up and everything else crashes down to, like, almost nothing. And so the person that you're going to spend the most amount of time for the rest of your life with is going to be your spouse or partner, whatever. And so it makes sense to think about who you're going to be with. I think people wildly underestimate how important it is and the amount of single people that I see right now who are like, ugh, I don't want to be on the apps.

The apps don't work. It's like we're talking about finding the one person you're going to be with for the rest of your life that you're going to spend the most amount of time with out of all humans, by, like, a wide, wide margin. And you're like, I don't want to go on more than ten dates. It's like, so you just want to spin the wheel ten times to just pick whatever of the ten that you get that you're like, I guess this one doesn't suck. And then that's it.

That's the rest of your life. It's like, I just want the rest of my life to kind of not suck. I just don't get it. So it's kind of like the inverse of selling. Like in sales, you have a pipeline and you know what your conversion percentages are?

The thing with finding significant other is you only need to find one. And I remember when I was way younger, like in high school, going to college, where some girls like, what are you looking for? Were like on a date thing. And it did not go the way she was expecting. I was just like, these are all the things im looking for.

And she was really discouraged and she was like, wow, looks like youre just trying to find a unicorn. I was like, well, you have to find one. She basically was making the insinuation, well, so few people are going to meet those standards. And I was like, right, if everyone meets the standards or most people meet those standards, how unique is that person? Probably not that unique.

So I believe in having exceptionally high standards, only second to the standards you hold yourself to. And I think theres a huge issue right now with all the single folks who are like, I want that unicorn. So either youve got like, camp number one, ill take anyone with a pulse and like, thats one way to do it. But I think that youll long term, youre just going to get the scraps of society, which sucks. Camp two, which is probably the more prevalent one, which is why so many people are struggling, is I want to have this amazing person, but I suck.

But they should be so amazing that they should see me for who I am deep down. Like deep, deep down. Like not like deeper. Even deeper. Like really deep down, they should be able to see that, right?

Even though I'm fucked up and I don't have a job and I'm overweight and I'd never stick with my commitments and I never follow through. Like besides all that, and I lie sometimes, you know what I mean? That I haven't been faithful for like past relationships, but still, and I'm not complimentary and like, I don't have any values that they aspire to be and I actually really have nothing going for me. But besides all of that, deep, deep down, I'm amazing. They just knew how to look, right?

That's like camp two. And I feel like that's a lot of people. And then camp three is I saw this meme that went all over the Internet, which is you can consolidate all of the relationship gurus dating advice to be successful. And they were making fun of that. And I was like, yes, that is at the end of everything.

That's it. And so you can learn 100 different hacks. And most of them are about deception. Like, realistically, most of the dating hacks that I see are about posturing and making people see you a certain way. But the thing is, on a long enough time, they're going to figure out who you are.

And so it's short term, long term, and so people don't want to do the harder long term work of just, like, being somebody worth being with and want to find out how they can optimize their dating profiles. And don't get me wrong, it's an ad. So get nice images. Sure. Like maybe spend five minutes on what you're going to have every single potential prospect in your life.

See, okay, that makes sense. But the real work is like, okay, you go on the date, now what? Right? You still have to be somebody that somebody might want to be with. So I'm a big domino believer, which is like, if I solve this one big thing, can I make all of the rest of these things go away?

I can do 100 tiny tweaks and hacks to try and find a girl who's out of my league, or I can just make myself so worthy that I can get any girl no matter what league she's in. And if I just do that, I don't need to optimize my profile, I don't need to have all these things because if I just have that, I'm fine. And so I've just, I've tended to try and find that one thing in business, in fitness, in relationships, and that served me pretty well because some of the younger guys are like, man, like, I can't find girls because I don't have a job and I don't have money. But, like, these girls are so shallow. It's like, are they?

Or is just like having a career or being ambitious just a proxy for other values and it's just an easy litmus test for them. It definitely changed over time. When I was in high school, it was different than it was when I was in college and different than when I was a young professional versus now, earlier on, it was probably far more exclusively about fun and aesthetics. So they have to look a certain way and they have to do what I want to do. Actually, if we chunk up, it probably has been that.

It's just that what I want to do has changed. And so when I was younger, it's like, I want to have fun, I want to do shit. You know what I mean? I want to travel around, I want to be spontaneous, whatever. And as I've gotten older, I was like, I want to do big shit.

That will be hard. And I need someone who can handle that. And so it's just a different type of person. Now some people are growth oriented in general and they shift with their seasons too. Like Layla and I joke that, like we're like, I'm really glad we didn't meet in high school.

But to be fair, when we were in high school, we were actually in the same, the same part of life. Like she was just like a crazy partier and so was I. And like that was like the season and we were like, we're going to go ten out of ten on that. And then we both went ten out of ten on school and had the same thing where we were absolute belligerent idiots for the first year of college and were like, wait, this isnt how I want to live my life. And both of us cleaned our act up so we lived really parallel lives in that way and then we left home and pursued fitness.

We have a lot of parallels. Persian dad, mom from France split really interesting parallels. Lived with dad, the second half lived with Mon earlier. We have a lot of really interesting parallels. Anyways, I think the number one thing for me has been the ability to grow.

Because if someone cannot adapt with new information, then even if you find somebody who's amazing now, in ten years you will have changed. And if they haven't are capable of change, then you're guaranteed that you will grow apart. Because even if one person stays the same, the other person keeps growing. There's going to be a gap. The second thing is that they enjoy doing the things that I do and I think there's a micro level and a macro level.

So micro level is like having somebody who's into fitness just makes my life easier because I'm going to go work out. And I had been in relationships where they saw me working out as a take, this could be time we're together, but instead you're going to go to the gym and. No, you know what I mean? I don't want that. If anything, this is me investing in making the person that you want to be with better.

So why would you not want that? If somebody saw that way, that would be a deal breaker. And then there's the macro kind of interest which is like, do you want to go after the same things as me. And I've always wanted to do epic things. I want to do really big stuff, and to do really big stuff, you have to overcome really big hurdles and obstacles and hardships for extended periods of time without reward.

And I needed somebody who could level one, understand that. Level two, support and cheer for that. Level three, be in the trenches with me. Now, I probably would have been fine with level two or level three. I just happened to have met level three and now that I have seen that, I could never go back.

But I could absolutely. Having not seen what level three looks like, probably been ignorantly happy at level two. Real quick wise, you guys already know that I don't run any ads on this and I don't sell anything. And so the only ask that I can ever have of you guys, that you help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs make more money, feed their families, make better products, and have better experiences for their employees and customers. And the only way we do that is if you can rate and review and share this podcast.

So the single thing that I asked you to do is you can just leave a review. It'll take 10 seconds or one type of thumb. It would mean the absolute world to me, and more importantly, it may change the world for someone else. There's probably level two things that Layla and I have right now that I just don't know what level three looks like, but I'm content with level two cause I don't know anything better. So growth, interest in the small, interest in the big, and making sure that we have aligned values.

No one's willing to do hard things. That's why most people don't. Most people just like go on autopilot and then die. I'm a huge advocate of first dates, just go on tons of them. And then I think just being willing to maintain the bar that like this was good, not great, and just not taking a good to a second date.

It was probably tough for a lot of the first dates I went on because they were like, hey, let's hang out again. And it might just be because either they thought I was some amazing dude, or I would say more realistically, they thought it was a good date, but their bar for what was enough of a match was just lower than mine was. I just didnt like they were in their career, they didnt seem that interested in business stuff. For me, thats always been a hard one because I love business and I only talk about business and I think about business and its all I do all day. If somebody wasnt into that, I could probably make the argument of, okay, well, theyll be.

My respite away from this presumes that I need a rest away from doing what I want to do. So there's this idea that I've been trying to explore a lot more lately, which is around the concept of work life balance. Sure, there's work life harmony, work life integration, but I think even the idea of work life balance presumes they are opposites. And so whenever anyone asks that, I already know what their views are. And so I've always wanted no work life balance because they're just life in general, and there is no balancing.

It just is. And so I think if I had somebody who didn't see the world that way, which is most people, that would be tough. I would say also it's hard. It would be harder for me to find someone now than to find someone when I did that. Now I could find hookups, pretty girls, blah, blah, blah, like that, for sure.

Easier now. But finding somebody who basically would have gone through the same stimuli that I went through over the last decade with Layla to get to where we're at now, it'd be almost impossible to put someone else through the same gauntlet so they could be shaped the same way. And so that's one of the pros of if you do get married young or find a partner young, is that you guys can go through the hardships together, and I think that creates a really deep bond. That being said, there's nothing wrong with achieving a lot of stuff and then finding a girl who's above your former threshold. I think both paths work.

I've seen both paths work. I just know the one that I did. There's two concepts I'll bring up on this. So one is people who want to be happy treat it like, I want to eat so good, I'm never hungry again, or I want to sleep so well, I never need to sleep again. But I think happiness is much more like that than it is.

This achievement thing that you like, check a box of it doesn't really work that way. Secondly, I think that all the people that I know who obsess about happiness are the least happy people outwardly, sure, but they're the ones who are, like, committing suicide. Nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want to do. But I'm just saying I worry about that because it's a goal that by having it as a goal, it automatically sits outside of you, which means there's space between you and the goal, which means you're not actually happy. My goal is to be happy, which means you aren't right now.

So I have made meaning, which is ironic because I don't find things inherently meaningful, but I have found meaningful work, as I deem meaningful, to be the thing that I derive the most joy from. And so I have it broken down to a more tactical level, which is what days have I enjoyed and looked back on and been proud of myself for that day? And over probably a three or four year period, I just looked at the good days and the bad days and I looked at what the good days had in common. And looked at what the bad days had in common. I've just, over time minimized the things that happen on the bad days and maximize the things that happen on the good days.

Even to big investments. Like I am much happier when I work out. Rather not even much happier when I work out. When I look back on my day, this was a good day. Almost always has a workout in it and usually with people I like.

And so workouts take probably longer for me than most people cause I'm not the I'm in and out in 45 minutes and I did my morning routine and I can dude, send out 40 emails from whatever, everyone's different. But for me, I work out for like 2 hours. It's cause I like to and so I do it and I do it with people that I like. And so I'm willing to invest the time because like what's the point anyways? Like why make all the money to what?

Enjoy it. Like I enjoy doing that. So I do that every day. I like writing so I write for, you know, four to 6 hours a day. And there's probably the two biggest activities that I do.

And if I can write with somebody that I like, then I do something I like with people I like. And I think that thats probably been the simplest formula is doing things you like with people you like and trying to maximize as much time as I can on that bucket. And then everything else I try and minimize is overhead or outsource. I think the research study probably had something to the degree of people rating themselves on subjective well being and then also rating their strength or relationship with spouse. So it had very strong correlation.

But like, again, thats because most people are like why am I not happy? They also see a problem with them not happy. They have it as an expectation of the world and the universe that they should be happy. And to the same degree, people have an expectation that life should be meaningful like why does life need to be meaningful? Why does the universe need to make you happy?

It doesnt. You can choose that, but its just not a requirement. And so they think theres something wrong with it, when in reality youre alive and you might procreate, you might not, but thats the only reason that youre here on the relationship video. Broke my wedding ring. Its a sign.

I dont know, silicon. Its like my third one. I recommend two years. Well, thats really what it comes down to. So if I boil it down, happiness is fleeting, because you get hungry again, you get sleepy again, meaning you can only really tell at the end.

Did I do something that contributed? But on the day to day perspective, I can know that what Im doing is useful. And if what youre doing is not useful, then I think that that's harder. And I also think that men and women are different here. So we use like happy.

I hate the term in general, but like, I think men and women want different things out of life and I think we bucket them together. It's also the same degree, like why therapy with men doesn't work necessarily the same. We have to have a different approach. People think men need more love, and I just don't think that's true. I think we want more respect.

And you get respect from being useful. And so I make that the goal. No one casts aside a man who is useful. And being useful is an attractive trait. Like if you see someone who's really good at something, it's a contributing member of society.

They do stuff that help other people. We want them here. You get status from that. And so that means that skill mastery in a very real way can help you attract the mate you want. Which is why I indexed a ton of my life around getting better at stuff.

And also from a stress perspective, people are like, I remember, I see sometimes these podcasts from successful entrepreneurs and they're like, man, I'm still worried I could lose it all tomorrow. I don't have that. I'm genuinely not afraid of losing it all tomorrow, because I have lost it before and I got it back. If you were lucky, because there are guys who get lucky, and if you are lucky, then absolutely you should be worried about it, because if you do lose it, you don't know how to get it back. But if you have skills, then I know that I can go to any business and help grow it.

And that's valuable, that's useful. And so even reframing the word value as usefulness is probably also an easier way to do it for people to kind of, like, comprehend. But I think if you make that the goal, it also takes it away from you. Well, I have a friend who's single and struggles because he's not happy. Successful, but not happy.

And so he obsesses on happiness. And I was like, did you know that when you obsess on happiness, all you do is think about you all day? That's all you're doing. You're just thinking about you all fucking day. How useless.